WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is telling Head Start providers to avoid dozens of terms in federal grant applications, including “race,” “belonging” and “pregnant people” — a directive that could reshape the early education program.
A coalition of organizations representing Head Start providers and parents said in court filings last month that the Department of Health and Human Services told a Head Start director in Wisconsin to cut those and over a dozen other terms from her application. She later received a list with nearly 200 words the department discouraged her from using in her application, including “Black,” “Native American,” “disability” and “women.”
President Donald Trump’s administration associates the terms with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which it has vowed to root out across the government.
The guidance could lead Head Start centers to preemptively drop anything that could be seen as fitting the administration’s definition of DEI, said Ruth Friedman, who led the Office of Child Care under President Joe Biden.
“Grantees are sort of self-selecting out of those activities beforehand because of fear and direction they’re getting from the Office of Head Start that they can’t do these important research-based activities anymore that are important for children’s learning and that are actually required by law,” Friedman said.
The filings came in a lawsuit filed in April by parent groups and Head Start associations in Washington, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials. They allege the Trump administration is illegally dismantling Head Start.
The plaintiffs say the administration is trying to force providers to change how they operate in violation of the Head Start Act, which requires directors to provide demographic information about their families, a task that becomes difficult if they are banned from using “Black,” “disability” and “socioeconomic.”
Health and Human Services officials said they do not comment on pending litigation.
Head Start centers receive the bulk of their funding from the federal government. The long-standing preschool and family support program serves babies, infants and toddlers who come from low-income households, foster care or homeless families.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys say the anti-DEI guidance has generated confusion for Head Start programs, which are operated by nonprofits, schools and government agencies. The grant application itself contains many of the banned words, asking directors to include demographic data about their community that includes estimates of the number of pregnant women and children with disabilities.
“This has put me in an impossible situation,” the unnamed Head Start director in Wisconsin wrote in the court filing. If she complies with the Head Start Act and includes the banned words in her application, she could end up losing her grant, she said. But if she follows the Trump administration’s guidance, she said she fears she’ll face penalties for violating the law down the line.
Another Head Start, located on a Native American reservation in Washington state, was told to cut “all Diversity and Inclusion-related activities,” leading it to drop staff training on how to support autistic children and children with trauma, according to the court filing. Officials there also told the director that she could no longer prioritize tribal members for enrollment — even though the Head Start Act expressly permits this. The word “Tribal” is among the disfavored terms.
For some, the new grant application rules are another attempt to undermine Head Start, a program with a history of bipartisan support that some conservatives have been attacking as problematic and ineffective.
“They don’t believe these public programs should actually be open to serving all communities,” said Jennesa Calvo-Friedman of the ACLU, an attorney for the plaintiffs. The effort to ban words from applications “is a way to gut the fundamentals of the program.”
Not long after Trump took office, his budget chief unsuccessfully tried to halt all federal grants, saying they needed to be reviewed to root out any DEI efforts. Head Start was not supposed to be part of the freeze, which was quickly reversed, but in the months afterward, grantees reported problems drawing down their funding. Some had to briefly close.
The Government Accountability Office later said the delays violated the Impoundment Control Act, which limits when the president can halt the flow of government funds.
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